I realize that I'm a non-central example of a phone customer, but I'd be more than willing to give up thinness for more repairability, and I loathe hole punch/cutout screens, so I would actively pay more money to get the simpler rectangular screen, which would presumably come with ease of repair benefits (assuming that were an option. Unfortunately, it appears that almost no one except Sony still makes rectangle displays for phones anymore).
It's absoultely true that making a phone more repairable comes with tradeoffs. Thinness being the most obvious one, but It's also likely true that a truly repairable phone would be more expensive.
I do not think that performance, reliability, or longevity are necessary tradeoffs though.
In a moment of reflection, transpose that idea to cars or planes. Commercial aircraft fly for 30 years or more, (with some flying since WW2) because they are repairable, not despite the fact that they are repairable.
The case could also be made for consumer white goods.
Let's not confuse enshitification with reliability.
Nobody wants a phone with the utilization rate or maintenance cost proportional to a commercial airliner.
They do not "fly for 30 years": they fly for a few thousand hours a year at most, amidst hundreds of man-hours of maintenance. A high level of repairability is a requirement for them to even operate for their intended purpose.
> They do not "fly for 30 years": they fly for a few thousand hours a year at most, amidst hundreds of man-hours of maintenance.
By 2021, N309US, a Delta Air Lines Airbus A320, had flown 89,638 hours in 31 years. That's an average of 2891 hours per year, or just short of 8 hours per day, every day, over 31 years.
The mean-time between overhaul of a CFM56 aircraft engine is 10,000 hours. Or, if you would drive at an average of 60 km/h, 600,000 kilometers. And that's for one of the most highly stressed part of an aircraft.
> Nobody wants a phone with the utilization rate or maintenance cost proportional to a commercial airliner.
So, to hit the same utilization rate as N309US, you would need to use your shiny iPhone 8 hours a day, every day of the year. Good luck with that.
> Phones are not aircraft.
Indeed. As we just discovered, they have a long, long, long way to go to come anywhere close.
Your examples confirm what I said. Your "30 year" aircraft spends 2/3rds of that time literally not functioning as an aircraft.
As for my "shiny iPhone" (I don't use an iPhone) and "Good luck" using it 8 hours a day: I don't understand the hostility or how you've arrived at the belief that 8 hours a day is a long time for a phone to operate. My unremarkable phone reports a current uptime of 180 hours. You're suggesting that being unusable for 16+ hours a day is the norm, but here on Earth, if phones routinely stopped working as phones for more than a few minutes a week people would riot.
The point is that there are different kinds of machines in the world with different constraints and demands in their designs, and different operating models for how they are used. You seem to be trying to make a better/worse argument out of things share practically nothing in common and it doesn't work at all.
